Demon Bound (6 page)

But Jack still got off the train at Queensway and walked to Lawrence’s flat, taking comfort in the crush of tourists and foreigners working the cheap souvenir shops and chain restaurants, and in the smell of sweat, smoke, diesel fumes, and humans. The feeling of being watched retreated, but
only a little. Jack had to get out of London before someone or -thing decided to speed his bargain along to the main event by putting claws or a bullet in his back.

Jack guessed that Nancy Naughton had been good for something, after all.

Lawrence folded his arms when he answered Jack’s knock, eyes glittering hard as gems. “Jack Winter, why you always bringin’ trouble to my door?”

Jack took a step back, out of choking distance. “I’ve only just bloody gotten here, Lawrence. Give me a few minutes to work up a proper trouble for you.”

Lawrence’s face broke into a grin. “Come you in, Jack. Always did like to take the piss from you, old devil.”

“No such thing,” Jack said, returning the smile, not meaning it. Lawrence stepped aside and let Jack in. There were no protection hexes in his flat, none of the dove-gray magic Jack trafficked in. Lawrence’s hearth magic enfolded his flat, created a glimmering wall of power that ugly and hungry things in the Black could never claw through. Being a white witch did have its rewards.

Jack shut the door after himself while Lawrence went to take the needle off his record. Jack stood in the center of Lawrence’s smothered living room, rugs and books and hunched furniture giving the place the air of a fussy old woman, not a six-foot-odd Rastafarian.

“You be wanting a beer?” Lawrence said, shuffling into his pocket-sized kitchen and rooting in the icebox.

Jack grinned. “Is the Pope a skin-changing incubus?”

Lawrence tossed him a bottle of Newcastle. Jack un-screwed the top with the tail of his shirt and sank into Lawrence’s armchair, downing the beer faster than was strictly gentle to his empty stomach.

“So tell me, Jack Winter, what trouble be vexing you this fine day?” Lawrence opened his own bottle and changed the record. Soft strains of Al Green floated through the thick air of the flat, scented with incense and high-quality marijuana. Jack grimaced around his mouthful of ale.

“You trying to calm me down, Lawrence? Keep me from doing something foolish?” Lawrence’s spell was subtle, smell, sound, and tactile sensation, but it was there, pressing on him gently as a helping hand.

“Anyone got eyes can see you wound up tight, boy,” Lawrence said calmly. “You clean now, I can’t offer you a toke, so I’m doing you the favor. Be gracious, now.”

“Trust me, you’re the only bastard who cares about that,” Jack said. “The cleanliness or lack thereof of my bloodstream.” He rubbed his chin. He still needed the shave. “I may be fucked, Lawrence.” The spell made it easy to talk, a safe sound booth with the world locked out.

Lawrence rolled his bottle in his hands. “Wouldn’t be him first time, being fucked.”

“Not this way,” Jack muttered darkly. “Not this hard.”

“True?” Lawrence said. “Tell me.”

Jack sighed. Lawrence was a stand-up white witch, and he operated strictly on the daylit side of the Black. Jack might well get himself punched in the balls and thrown out of the flat when he told Lawrence his problem. Hearth witches didn’t deal with demons. In the bad times, the bloody times, they’d hunted those who did by the side of
the witchfinders. Jack rolled his bottle across the back of his neck. The flat was close and too warm, smothering him all at once. That had been war. This was Lawrence. Lawrence had to at least hear him out. Jack hoped.

“What would you say if I told you I owed a very bad bloke?” he asked Lawrence. “The kind who doesn’t fuck about.”

Lawrence lifted one shoulder. “How bad we talking, mate?”

“Peel the skin off of adorable household pets in front of your kiddies, bad,” Jack said. “And not patient, and not kind.”

Lawrence nodded once, slowly. “Bad, yes. That is. Three times bad for you, Jack Winter.”

“He’s put the word on the infernal wires,” Jack said. “So I can’t even try to reason with . . . him.” Demons favored certain bodies, but Jack had never known one with a definite set of gear. “I’ve got my bloody foot clamped right in a bear trap,” he told Lawrence, “and I can’t see my way to chewing it off.”

Lawrence set his beer down, pressed his hands together like he was in church. He didn’t look at Jack until he finally asked, “How much time you got?”

“Some,” Jack said. “Not enough.”

“Let’s Stay Together” ended and the record hissed softly in the space between music.

“I had ideas, mind,” Lawrence said. “You got a duppy on you back, Jack Winter, sure as any man I ever met. I seen the hints, little things you say and do.”

“Like go shambling around London stoned to me gills?” Jack quirked a grin, an entirely fake one. Lawrence didn’t return it.

The telephone buzzed from under a pile of Aramaic scrolls, and on the third ring Lawrence stirred himself and plucked the old rotary handset from the mess. “Hail.”

After a moment he passed the set to Jack. “It’s your woman.”

“She’s not my anything,” Jack said. “Oi, Pete.”

Pete’s voice came from far away, down a well full of other souls. In the background Jack heard the cool female robot of the Underground announce, “
This is a Hammersmith & City Line to Hammersmith
.”

“I spoke with Inspector Patel at New Scotland Yard,” Pete said. A bus horn blatted in the background as she ascended from tube sounds to traffic sounds.

“Where are you?” Jack said, tucking the phone under his chin.

“Paddington,” Pete said. “Just fetching a bite before I go home. It was a suicide, Jack. The local coppers cleared it last week.”

“Doesn’t mean a ghost,” he insisted. “Sometimes a hanging is just a hanging.”

Pete huffed. “Fine. Do you want to give back the five hundred quid, or should I?’

“It’s a questionable job, Pete, and I’m not bounding over the Moor like sodding Heathcliff on some nonce’s say-so,” he said.

Lawrence shook his head, drawing a finger across his throat. Jack threw him the bird while Pete muttered something on the line. It might have been “Tosser.”

“Meet me at the station and we’ll go home, then,” she snapped. “Since you know bloody everything today.”

The phone gave a pathetic click when she rang off, and Jack hung up the set.

“You a braver man than I,” Lawrence said, chuckling. “I spoke to my lady so, she’d cut me head off and put it in a flowerpot.”

“It ain’t like that,” Jack said, irritation crawling all over him like a swarm of ants.

“She could be right.” Lawrence fixed Jack with a hard
stare. “The Smoke be no place for you until this is settled. Too many eyes watchin’, too many tongues waggin’. Country air clears the mind. Even inside your thick skull.”

“Bugger off,” Jack muttered. “You want to be my mum, put on an apron and fix me a meat pie.”

Lawrence stood and went to the door, flipping the bolt and opening it enough for someone skinny as Jack to slip out. “I have sympathy for what you done, Jack. But now the truth be known, I can’t be your sanctuary.”

Jack stood. He didn’t feel angry or betrayed, or any of the things you were supposed to feel when one friend of only a few turned his back on you. In a lifetime of doors slamming in his face, the novelty wore off quickly. The stone in his chest just grew a bit heavier. “Thanks for not turning me in, at any rate.”

“I am a worthy witch,” Lawrence growled. “I bow to no demon’s order.”

“In a few months we’ll have a pint and a laugh about this,” Jack promised, stepping into the hallway. The Black rushed back, flowing around Lawrence’s flat like water around a bridge piling in the Thames.

“Jack.” Lawrence bowed his head. “You know you don’t go making promises you can’t keep. How bad is it?”

“I bargained for my life,” Jack said shortly. “And a life is what I owe it. It’s bad business, Lawrence. Bad all around, up, down, and sideways. But don’t worry your pretty head.” Jack dropped Lawrence a wink. “I’ll get it sorted. I’m still planning on being here at thirteen years and a day.”

“Don’t you take up no fortune-telling, boy,” Lawrence said. “The future, she not your strong point.”

The rain had started when Jack’s boots hit the pavement, the thin miserable midwinter rain that foreigners thought of when they thought of England. Jack hunched inside his leather, and felt ice slide down his shoulders into the curve of his spine.

He wound through side streets like a maze rat until the porticoes of Paddington loomed up, and the rain finally ceased.

Pete waited beside a ticket machine near the National Rail tracks, under the grimy iron braces and the blackened ceiling of the station’s top floor. Being inside Paddington was like being inside a giant lung, black and tarred over from decades of smoke and the resultant soot.

Pete stood still and watchful in the way that only coppers and psychopaths excelled at. Hands in pockets, head thrown back to give the appearance of indifference, eyes unblinking and sharp as they skipped from the kiosks selling pastries and noodles to the groups of anxious foreign travelers gathered under the bank of National Rail schedule boards to the heavily peroxided Londoner stuffed like
an anemic sausage into her slim dungarees, designer boots, and fur jacket.

“It was
awful,
just
awful,
” the woman intoned into her mobile. “Not a proper vodka tonic anywhere in the hotel. That’s bloody France for you.”

Jack considered taking a dip inside her handbag, one of those enormous blue sharkskin types that a family of refugees could live inside comfortably for some months, but gave it up in favor of watching Pete.

She hadn’t seen him yet. One small hand went to her neck, worked the kinks free. Pete’s old gig with the Met had made her a hand at blending, but in recent weeks she’d scuttled her wool pea coat for the canvas army jacket and had begun wearing her hair down instead of in a practical knot at the back of her skull. Little touches—pink lip gloss rather than plain, black nails like the very first time Jack had seen her, a dozen years ago at an underground club in Soho.

Not a dozen. Nearly thirteen. The weight of the demon’s smile washed away the odd sort of calm Pete carried with her. She had the demeanor of a battlefield nurse, unyielding but a comfort nonetheless simply because she’d ventured into the corpses and laid a hand against your cheek.

She’s too good for the likes of you
, the fix whispered.
Come with me, luv. I’ll never tell you no.

The pressure of a rotten and magic-riddled day built up behind Jack’s eyes. At least Paddington was so crushed with life and strapped with iron that the sight was silent.

He took a step forward, raised a hand. “Pete.”

The woman with the mobile smacked into him, shoulder to shoulder. Hers was even bonier than Jack’s.

“Watch
out
,” she snarled. “I’ve a mind to call the policeman over here, you.”

“Eat a curry, luv, and cheer up,” Jack returned. “Unless you’re keeping so slim because your bloke fancies a bit of necrophilia.”

“Cretin!” the woman snapped, and stomped away, boot heels clacking like bones on the station’s tile floor.

“I think she likes you,” Pete said. “The two of you could share bleaching tips.”

“Sod off,” Jack said, and Pete rewarded him by smiling. No Naughton, this time. Just him.

The secret of the demon grew larger and sharper, pushing on Jack’s heart and his guts.

“What is it?” Pete said. “You look peaked.”

“Nothing,” Jack said. “Just fancy a fag, is all.”

“Can it wait?” Pete worried the zip on her jacket. “We should get to driving if we want to make Naughton’s by midnight.”

“’Course.” Jack shrugged. He could do apathetic, do it well. He’d been a punk frontman, after all.

Pete slipped her arm through his and her sudden proximity, her smell of clean linen shampoo and perfume and a little sweat, nearly made him stagger. He rolled his eyes upward in an effort to stave off a word, or a touch, or fuck it, a thought that would betray him as nowhere near cool and in control, the diametric opposite of what Pete and the world at large thought him. He was nearly forty—he shouldn’t be fainting at a girl’s touch. But the problem came again: it wasn’t a girl. It was Pete.

When Jack opened his eyes, the crow sat on the cross-beams of the station roof, and flicked its beak behind Jack as if to say,
Watch your arse, old son.

In the same moment, his sight flared, like someone had put a pipe across the back of his skull.

Jack spun back the way he’d come, so quickly that he dragged Pete around in a drunken dance with him.

Two figures moved through the crowd disgorged from a Bristol train, two men in workman’s coveralls when he looked straight on, and emaciated forms with black, bleeding holes for eyes when he blinked.

Jack skidded to a stop, Pete stumbling against him. “Fuck.”

Pete’s eyes widened. “What is it? What’s happened?”

“Those two.” Jack jerked his chin. The figures passed by and through travelers, and where they touched, faces fell and eyes narrowed in anger. Travelers shoved. Babies shrieked. A woman in a green wool coat slapped her lover and ran off in the direction of the loo, sobbing.

“Yeah?” Pete let go of him, dropping her shoulders and curling her fists, like a small but determined bulldog. Jack had witnessed her drop men twice her size, but these were not men. The cold encroachment of their energy prickled the hair on his arms, made the ink in his tattoos dance, made the Black spin in front of his eyes as his sight  screamed to show him the true faces of the things before him.

“Sluagh,” he said.

“Gesundheit?” Pete said hopefully. Jack shook his head. An entry from one of Seth McBride’s diaries swam up into his mind.
Sluagh. Restless spirits.

Seth may have been a wanker, the bastard child of con man, mage, and roaring Irish drunk, but he knew ghosts, knew them better than any man besides Jack himself. He’d taught Jack enough to stay alive for another nineteen-odd years, at least.